


am i the only living soul around

by younglegends



Category: Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 07:24:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11270793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglegends/pseuds/younglegends
Summary: When the world’s coming to an end you hit the ground running. You don’t get time to breathe. But when the world survives, so do you, and so does everything you were running away from in the first place.Or: A story in backwards order.





	am i the only living soul around

**Author's Note:**

> title from, of course, the beloved [handclap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqwkVNmaPEs) by fitz and the tantrums.
> 
> **warnings:** heavy mentions of death that occurs in canon (and death in general), suicidal ideation (not explicit but definitely a thing so proceed with caution), swearing, and underage drinking (as it happens in the movie).

> You’re only young once, they say, but doesn’t it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.
> 
> —Hilary Mantel, “An Experiment in Love”

 

They’re at Trini’s house, of all places, for dinner. Her mother had wanted to meet the new people Trini’s been hanging out with lately, although _wanted_ was too harmless a word to be accurate. “You don’t have to come,” Trini’d said, her mouth tight, “we should just blow it off,” but Kimberly’d put her hand on her arm and smiled.

“Trini,” Kimberly said, slow and earnest. “I would _love_ to have dinner with your family.”

Trini’d pushed her arm off and scowled. “Your funeral,” she said, but she hadn’t argued, and now they’re here, the five of them. They’ve cheated death countless times, come back from the centre of the earth itself, faced the oldest alien villain known to Earth and won. Trini’s mother’s piercing stare over the dinner table should be much less intimidating, Jason thinks. It isn’t, but it should be.

“So let me get this straight,” she says, after she’s dragged out introductions more thorough than they would have liked and run all possible small talk into the ground and Jason’s used up all the ways you can compliment someone on their seven-layer bean dip in order to distract them from Billy’s nervous chatter and Zack’s panicked throat-slitting gestures. “An ex-cheerleader, a science geek, a kid who lives in a trailer park, and Angel Grove’s own infamous football quarterback, once golden, now—” she raises an eyebrow “—something else, or so the rumours say. What have any of you got to do with my daughter? What on earth do any of you have in common?”

Zack looks offended—Kimberly has to kick his shin under the table to keep him from snapping back. Billy shrugs—everything she’s said is technically true. Trini’s fork is clenched so tight in her fist it’s gonna crack any moment now, but Jason leans back in his chair, grins up at her mother, sweet as the apple pie she’s brought out for dessert.

“We’re friends,” he says, and they all look at him then. “Haven’t you heard?”

 

The worst thing about it all, Trini thinks, is that now she knows there’s more to this world. She’s seen it—she’s _fought_ for it—and now she’s back to having to pretend that the banality of high school life and small-town suburbia is all there is. Didn’t you see it, too, she wants to shout at every stranger she passes by on the street. Didn’t you catch a glimpse. We were all there when what we thought we knew about this world was turned on its head—don’t pretend you don’t remember. Don’t pretend it doesn’t mean a thing.

“How can you _stand_ it,” she says one day after school to Kimberly, whose locker’s been long since fitted with a new door. She wants to rip it right off its hinges again, to wipe away the ink of the words scrawled there and smear it on the faces of the girls who wrote them. It hadn’t mattered, back when she’d done it the first time, back when everything was ending and part of the thrill was not knowing if it would ever come back. But it had—because Trini had fought for it—and she doesn’t know why she’s now disappointed that nothing’s changed at all. Why she’d ever expected it to. “God—we saved the _world,_ and we’ve still got to deal with this shit—”

“Shh,” Kimberly says, and she looks almost amused, taking a wet paper towel to the locker door like she’s wiping moisture off a mirror. “Not so loud, will you? Listen—it’s fine. This stuff used to bother me, but it doesn’t, anymore. Not as much, anyway. It’s like you said.” She smiles, and it’s stupid, Trini thinks—she shouldn’t be smiling. She should be angry. Trini’s seen her angry, in the midst of battle, on the verge of death. She’s seen what she’s capable of. “We saved the world, after all.”

“Yeah, and maybe instead of writing death threats on your locker they should be feeling a little grateful to be alive,” Trini says, rolling her eyes. “How can you just take this? How can you stand living with this?”

Kimberly frowns at last, but it’s not at her locker—it’s at Trini. “Because it’s all there is,” she says. “It’s all there ever was.”

“That’s not true,” Trini says, her voice rising, not that it matters in the deserted hallway, in this town. Not like anyone’s listening anyway. “You know it isn’t, you of all people know it isn’t—you know what we did, what we _are_ —”

“What we _are,_ ” Kimberly says, getting louder at last as she whips her head around to look at her, “is _alive,_ Trini. We’re alive, so this is what we do, this is all there is _to_ do. We live.”

“Yeah, but we _would_ have died,” Trini says. It sounds petulant, like a child’s whine, even to her own ears, but she’ll be damned if she lets this go. “We would have died for this planet—and for what?” For the suspicion in her mother’s eye every time she leaves the house and every time she comes back to it? For detention after school and English homework? For _this?_

Kimberly’s hand closes around Trini’s wrist, and she sucks in a breath, surprised. “For exactly this,” Kimberly says, voice shaking with a desperation Trini hasn’t heard in weeks, not since Rita Repulsa vanished into the sky like the distant light of a dead star. Nails digging into Trini’s skin, keeping her still. “This is how people live, Trini. The world almost ended but it didn’t, because this is what we chose to protect. You remember, don’t you? When you chose? You remember what you were thinking of, then?”

She does. Four AM, standing on the steps, still shaking from the weight of Rita’s fingers curled around her neck, and all she could think about was the crack in the wall her body had made, how her mother was gonna freak out when she saw—but Trini would take it, maybe, all the screaming and the shouting, if only it meant it could be fixed.

“This is what we wanted,” Kimberly says. “This and nothing less. To live with what we’ve done.”

Trini doesn’t look up. Studies the shape of Kimberly’s fingers circled around her wrist. “It’s just,” she says. “I thought it would be easier.”

Kimberly lets go, only to take Trini’s hand in hers. Her fingernails leave red indentations where they were pressing into Trini’s wrist. The strength of Kimberly’s belief, Trini notes, comes with its sting, and she lets it sink into her skin, until she carries the weight of it, too.

“Me, too,” Kimberly says quietly. “God, me too.”

They stand there in silence for a moment, and then Kimberly straightens up, her smile back. Christ, Trini thinks, almost disgusted. How is she real. “C’mon,” Kimberly says, and she’s pulling Trini away from the half-cleaned locker. With her other hand she pulls out her phone, fires off a text. “Let’s get out of here, find the others. How does Krispy Kreme sound to you?”

Trini makes a face, but lets herself be pulled. “Really? After everything?”

“Yeah,” Kimberly says, teeth flashing white, “’cause you’re paying,” and Trini lets out a bark of laughter.

“Not if I beat you there,” she says, and they’re off.

In the end it’s Jason who gets suckered into paying for the five of them. At Billy’s suggestion they take a box of doughnuts to eat down at the wharf, and he spends enough time peering down at the glassy surface of the water to make Trini uneasy, but then he gets started on a history of all the artifacts that have been dredged up from the bottom of Angel Grove and even the furrow in Jason’s brow smooths out. Then Zack accidentally drops his doughnut into the water and tries to steal Trini’s, which results in a wrestling match that gets them kicked off the boardwalk before she can completely kick his ass, and Kimberly’s got frosting on her cheek the whole time and nobody tells her until Jason gets at least six stealth shots of her face and sends them all to the group chat and Trini laughs so hard her stomach hurts. Licks the sweetness off her lips all the way to the house she calls her home.

 

When the world’s coming to an end you hit the ground running. You don’t get time to breathe. But when the world survives, so do you, and so does everything you were running away from in the first place. Turns out punching an alien in the face doesn’t solve your problems here on this earth. Zack can’t exactly punch the dark circles under his mother’s eyes, the weight that keeps her pinned to her bed. He thinks even if he could, he’d lose the fight anyways.

“Zack,” his mother says, the only word in this language that’s never sounded wrong on her tongue. “You’re still going to school, right? You’re eating? Sleeping?”

“Worry about yourself, ma,” Zack says, a hand in her hair, a lump in his throat. “Not about me.”

She tilts her head back against the pillows, corner of her mouth lilting up in a rueful smile. “I’m your mother,” she says. “If I don’t worry about you, who will?”

“And I’m your son,” Zack says. Runs his hand over the embroidery on her blanket, so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. “You know me.”

“I do,” she says, and it sounds so, so sad.

If there was ever a time he felt like he belonged to this world it was when they were emerging from the heart of the earth itself, all of them together in fiery rebirth. But now it seems so very far away. Like something someone else did in a story once. A story like the ones his mother used to tell him. He’s the one who tells her stories, now—about a boy who does his homework and eats breakfast every morning and dreams in his sleep at night. About her good little boy.

“Zack,” his mother whispers when he bends over to collect her plate, mouth against his ear. “I’m glad you have friends, now.”

There’s more pride in her eyes than he could ever have received for getting an A, for saving the world, and Zack’s heart stutters, because more than anything he wishes he could deserve it. Because it’s true, for a while there he didn’t have to go it alone, but now the dust’s long settled and the fight’s over for all of them but him. It’s his, and his alone, and it’s not returning to this fight that scares him—it’s what he’s gonna do when it ends. Fighting, after all, is what he does best. Holding onto things tooth and nail. Letting go is a different kind of battle. No guts, no glory—just a slow bleeding out. It requires a gentleness, a grace. The dignity of surrender. And Zack isn’t very good at being gentle.

Still, sometimes he still has it in him to try, so he tells her what she wants to hear. What he wants to believe.

“Me, too,” he says.

He stays until she falls asleep, absentmindedly tracing patterns into the back of her hand. Eventually they turn into the handful of Chinese characters he still remembers how to write. The ones that’re easy to remember, because—as his mother’d once taught him—they look like what they mean: 山. 火. 人. 飞.

“Of course you can,” his mother murmurs. “My angel.”

When he leaves he sets the plate down in the sink, closes the door carefully behind him, steps outside the trailer to a world that looks like it’s never changed at all, and he wants to burn it all to the ground—

Except Trini’s there, then, falling into step beside him as he stalks away, and so’s Jason.

“Where are you going,” Trini says, and Zack looks up at the mountains, the sky beyond it.

“The mine,” he says, and they nod, and follow him, and don’t ask questions, and Zack breathes out, lets go of the clench of his fists.

 

“Hey, Jason,” Billy says. They’re in his house, the two of them—Trini’s babysitting her brothers and Kimberly’s out with her parents and to be quite honest, none of them really know where Zack is. He does that sometimes, just goes off the grid, and they let him, even if Billy doesn’t really understand why. Jason says sometimes the guy just wants to be alone, but Billy remembers the campfire, remembers Zack shouting out all his secrets into the night like he just couldn’t hold his loneliness inside him anymore. Thinks maybe Zack just wants to hear a sound that isn’t an echo off the cliffs, even if he doesn’t ask for it, and he should bring this up to Jason sometime, but first he’s gotta tell him—

“Billy?” Jason says. Billy snaps out of it to see Jason staring at him, a smile tugging at his mouth. He’s stretched out across the couch, but it’s too small to fit him, his legs hanging over the other side. “You spaced out, dude—what did you want to say?”

Right. First he’s gotta tell him this. “I remember everything,” Billy says.

Jason raises an eyebrow. “I know,” he says.

“Right, and I know you know,” Billy says, “because I told you it once, back before I blew up the mine, when I was explaining to you my condition, how my brain works different from everybody else’s, you were helping me carry the toolbox—”

“Yeah, I remember, Billy,” Jason says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Billy nods, swallows. Looks down at his hands. He’s tinkering, just with some scrap metal, odds and ends, nothing that really adds up to anything, but he needs something to do with his hands right now. “Right so—I remember everything, except one thing, now, and it’s the only thing I’ll never remember, I think—”

Jason doesn’t say anything, doesn’t interrupt. Just waits him out patiently, hands laced together behind his head.

“I don’t remember what it was like when I was dead,” Billy says, and his voice is steady. “I did the math—I was dead for one hour and forty-eight minutes, and I keep thinking—I keep getting stuck on it, you know, because I should remember, shouldn’t I, if there’s anything that’s actually important enough in the whole world for me to remember it should be this, right? So I can know what I’ll never know from anything else, so I can know what it’s like to be dead, what it’s like for—”

“Billy,” Jason says, and Billy swallows, drops his gaze back down.

“Right, sorry,” he says, “just got carried away again, you know how it is—”

“Billy,” Jason says again, firmly. Billy glances up, then does a double take. When did Jason get up? He’s in front of him now, eyes serious. “I’m glad you don’t remember.”

And maybe he doesn’t understand, and Billy’s just gotta explain it in a way he can. “But, see, if I remembered, then I’d know—”

“I’m glad you don’t remember,” Jason says, “because you shouldn’t have to. Some things, you shouldn’t have to know.”

Billy falls silent. But it’s his job, he thinks. It comes easy to him, finding things to carry home with him, only ever adding to the weight. Numbers and distances and times, facts that straighten out the world around him and make it knowable, and how his dad would ruffle his hair every time he got something right, say with wonder in his voice— _that’s my boy. That’s my boy._ But his dad isn’t around anymore, and Billy doesn’t miss him as much anymore, except when he’s run through his entire country music playlist and lined up everything in his workstation perfectly and thinks that if only he could remember—the closest he’s been to his father in seven years, five months, and eighteen days, and if only he could remember what it felt like, if he’d seen him there—

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Jason says.

Billy closes his eyes. Three seconds of inhale, three seconds of exhale. Through his lungs, rattling his ribcage, and then his blood pumping it back up to his brain. The steady pulse of his heart. What it means to be alive. He can’t remember what it was like to be dead, but as long as he’s alive, he can still remember his father. As long as he’s alive he’s still got his mother.

“So am I,” Billy says, and Jason laughs, pulls him into a hug, and Billy—usually doesn’t like to be touched, not after his father stopped being able to give him bone-crushing hugs and slaps on the back, but he’s starting to get back into the hang of it, when Trini fistbumps him and Kimberly grabs his hand like she’s afraid to let him go and Zack slings an arm across his shoulders and knocks their heads together, laughing as though at a joke, but one Billy understands now, too. And as long as he’s alive, he’ll have them, too, so he hugs Jason back.

“So am I,” he says, the sun coming in through the blinds, the world making itself more and more knowable all around him as he presses his palm to Jason’s back. “So am I.”

 

The Power Rangers are everywhere. On television, in the news, even plastered across comic books. Some mornings Kimberly looks into the mirror and sees them there, too—the helmet of the Pink Ranger, the superhero who helped save the world. Other mornings she sees a monster. It’s terrifying enough to make her crawl back into bed, pull the covers over her head until she emerges as human again. But the monster always comes back. She knows this because it’s a part of her. It’s always been a part of her.

It all comes to a head one day when she passes by a poster of the Power Rangers on the wall of the school hallway, and she can’t take it anymore. She turns around and runs, past the crowds of students and the teachers yelling her name, up the stairs to the girl’s restroom on the second floor. It’s a route she knows by heart, and when she bangs open the doors, Amanda’s there, reapplying her lipstick over the bathroom sink.

“What are you doing here,” Amanda says, eyes narrowing.

“I’m sorry,” Kimberly says. Gasps, really, out of breath, one hand still shoved up against the door, and she lets go of it, lets it slam shut.

For a moment Amanda’s eyes flash with real surprise, but it’s gone just as fast.

“I’m sure you are,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Not exactly enjoying yourself with all the other freaks in detention, are you?”

“No, it’s not about that,” Kimberly says, “it’s about you. It’s about what I did to you.” She swallows.

“Look,” Amanda begins, but Kimberly doesn’t let her finish.

“I’m not asking for your forgiveness,” Kimberly says, and it takes all her strength to get it out past her lips, more than she ever needed to fly her Zord or kill Goldar or save the world. “I know what I did can’t be forgiven. I just wanted to say—I had to say—I’m sorry. I was awful, and I hurt you in the worst way, because I was supposed to be your friend, and even though back then I didn’t even realize I was doing it, now I can’t imagine—I can’t imagine what it would feel like, to be hurt like that by someone you thought was a friend. Back then I don’t even know if I cared, but I do now. And it’s too late, I know, but I still have to say—I’m trying to change, now, and I’m sorry.”

Amanda’s squinting at her, like she doesn’t quite recognize her, like she doesn’t even know who she is. “Whatever,” she says, slowly. “I don’t give a fuck. Go back to your shitty life, Kimberly Hart- _less,_ and disappear from mine,” and she stows her lipstick back into her purse, shoves past her on her way out.

Kimberly doesn’t move for a long time. Just stands there with all the weight of what she’s done. Who she’s been, and who she wants to be. In the bathroom mirror she catches a glimpse of her reflection. Sees herself.

 

Jason wakes up from sleep and thinks he had a dream. He can’t quite remember it, but he knows he had one. There was light, and grass under his feet, and wind. It felt nice. He wishes he could remember it. It’s been a long time since he had a dream. He gets out of bed, goes to school. It’s a good day. Even Zack’s there, slouching in the back row of history class. Jason smiles at him, and Zack looks at him, mouths _what_ , and Jason bites down the urge to laugh. Shakes his head.

At lunch they forego the cafeteria, sit out by the bleachers instead, on the field. Grass, Jason’s thinking, and wind, and light, and then Zack says through a mouthful of burger, “You know, you never did tell us anything about yourself.”

Jason laughs. “Didn’t have to,” he says, ignoring Zack’s look of exaggerated skepticism. “We all morphed fine without that, didn’t we? I told you—everyone already knows who I am.”

“It’s not about that,” Kimberly says suddenly, and Jason stops, swivels his stare to her. “It’s not about us, what we know. It’s different. It has to come from you.” She holds his gaze, swirls the straw in her cup. “You know that. It’s not about what everyone else thinks.”

“It is, actually,” Jason says. “Because everyone knows who I am. Everyone except me.”

Nobody says anything. Not Zack, not Trini, not Billy with his wide eyes nor Kimberly looking at him so intent she might actually see him. For once no one speaks for him, so he does it himself.

“Thought I was a football star,” Jason says, “because that’s what everyone else told me, until one day I woke up and couldn’t remember why it mattered, why it was so important. Then I thought I was a screw-up because that’s what my dad told me, that’s what the police monitor around my ankle told me, that’s what walking past the stares down the hallway to detention told me, and it was almost a relief, that I didn’t have to be golden, not anymore. That I could be less. Then I thought I was a Power Ranger, that I was a superhero, a leader, and I was more, after all, even more than I was before, and I really did believe it, because I wanted to. I thought this was what I was supposed to be all along. But Rita’s gone and the world’s still standing, and maybe now I gotta be something else, but I don’t know what.”

There’s a silence broken only by the afternoon breeze, ruffling his hair. And then Trini says, “What do you want to be, Jason?”

Jason thinks about it. Finds himself remembering his dream.

“Think I wanna be free,” he says.

 

As Zack punches a Putty into satisfying rubble he can’t help but think it’s only fitting that the five of them came together through violence. The first time, in the aftermath of Billy’s explosion in the mine, and in this battle now, and all the times between, when they beat Zordon’s holograms into the ground until they barely had any breath left in their lungs, and then they even used the last of that to bicker because the enemies were gone and all they had left to fight was each other. Maybe someday the dust’s gonna settle, and they’ll be forced to live with each other under the light of day, but for now Zack can’t imagine anything beyond the next blow, because for the first time in so long he doesn’t have to think. Reduced to nothing but his body as he launches it at Goldar and feels the echoing crash of his Zord doing the same, down to his bones.

If his mother could see him now, Zack thinks wildly, dodging the smash of Goldar’s fist by the skin of his teeth, she might even be proud.  

But of course it’s not enough, the five of them losing ground—literally—to the pit opening up behind them, swallowing chunks of asphalt and snapping at their heels. Zack keeps fighting, because it’s what he’s good at, it’s what he does, and because he’ll go to hell before he admits defeat to anything, least of all this, but he can feel the heat of the flames blistering into his skin even through the machinery and glass. He knows with absolute clarity what’s coming next. He’s always known it.

So this is what it feels like, Zack thinks, to die, and he grits his teeth, steels himself—but for some reason it’s not as bad as he’s always imagined. Maybe it’s because he’s not alone. He can hear Trini’s voice calling out to him—crazy girl, he knew she always cared. It’s almost enough to make him smile. His last thought before they tip over the edge is one of awful relief, that in the end he didn’t have to see his mother go, that he’ll be the one waiting for her on the other side—

And then they emerge from death itself on wings of fire up into the blue sky waiting for them, like an avenging angel come to take back the world. From this height everything looks tiny—Rita, Goldar, the town at their feet. They could do anything, Zack realizes. Lift off from the ground and disappear into space. Instead, they raise their fists, as one. Turns out that as good as they are at fighting each other, they’re even better together, even if it takes them a minute to work it out.

But then again, why is he surprised? Hadn’t his mother told him? _They’re real, Zack, one day you’ll see,_ and Zack looks down at the world below him, big and bright and neverending, and laughs long and loud, because he can almost believe it.

 

Billy dies. Billy dies and stays dead, and no, Jason thinks, that’s impossible—that they could die, that anyone could die, that Billy of all people would die. Billy talking his mouth off a mile a minute about things Jason couldn’t possibly begin to understand, numbers and science and natural phenomena, the odds of lightning striking a tree, and it can’t be possible. He holds Billy’s face in his hands, presses his ear to Billy’s chest, feels for the pulse that should be there in his wrist. Carries his body all the way to the cliff’s edge and beyond, and still he can’t believe it. If aliens exist, if their superpowers exist, if all this is real then Billy’s death can’t be, because there’ll be some way to save him, and if none of it is real then they’ll wake up any moment now, Billy most of all.

“I’m sorry,” says the voice in the wall, and it can’t be possible, because—

“It matters,” Jason says aloud, and thinks of the piles of tools and plans in Billy’s workstation, of Billy’s mother offering him a glass of juice every time he came round to his house, of Billy staring him down in the school hallway and saying those same words. It matters because Jason would die for Billy any day of the week, but Billy made calculations, followed the spiderweb of consequences across the cracks of windshield glass, cared enough about what came after because he’d had to live with it himself, and Billy had measured them against it all and found them worth it.

Of course it was a lie, Jason had said, we’re not heroes, but even in this Billy’d had to go and prove him wrong, hadn’t he. Like when he’d snapped a cage around his ankle and silenced the beeping like magic; when he’d gone and located a crystal lost to even aliens with technology older than the earth itself. When he’d stood there in the cave with wonder in his eyes, body encased in the most brilliant blue, the rest of them stuck staring at him, the brightest thing they’d seen in ages.

“This is the _only_ thing that matters,” Trini’s saying, and behind them, the morphing grid starts to light up.

 

_Krispy Kreme,_ Zack mouths, and Billy would laugh if Rita’s gold-plated nails weren’t on his face, digging into his skin. It doesn’t make any sense, anyway, laughing when the alien intent on destroying the world is _right there,_ has got them all chained to a fishing boat, and the odds of surviving this are zero to none, but Billy absurdly remembers Jason, then, Jason in the backseat when the five of them were flying down the road trying to outrace a freight train, Jason when Billy glanced up in the rearview mirror to see his eyes alight, looking almost like he was on the verge of a laugh in the face of death bearing down upon them at seventy miles an hour and it should have scared Billy, should have made him see sense, but all it did was make him push down harder on the pedal.

He really only misses a few seconds, but he guesses they’re important seconds, because the next thing he knows gravity has him in its grip, and the water’s dark as a grave, and Billy wonders if this, too, was the last thing his father saw.

 

“She nearly killed me,” Trini says, and her voice does not tremble, and Kimberly clenches her eyes shut. So it’s real. So they’re all gonna die and it was all for nothing. Maybe two weeks ago she wouldn’t have cared, but the others don’t deserve this, not this stupid town she grew up in that doesn’t have a clue, not Billy holding onto everything that belonged to his father, not Zack and his mother bleeding out by the day, not Trini crumbling so easy over a bottle of beer, and how could Kimberly have opened herself up for them to see? How could she have shown them who she really was? Who the world had chosen to be a hero with them?

It’s me, Kimberly wants to say. It’s me, I’m why we can’t morph, I’m what’s holding us back. But Jason’s beat her to the punch, only he’s talking about something else, something they can do, and it’s strange, Kimberly thinks, to see something behind his eyes, where nothing was before. And if looking at his face was once like a mirror, then seeing this must mean the same can be possible for her.

“Let’s vote,” Jason says, and there’s a beat, and then Trini, of all people, is raising her hand. Trini who rolls her eyes every time Billy says the word _superhero_ and might be the one person who hates this town more than Kimberly does. Trini’s not even _from_ here—Angel Grove didn’t birth her, didn’t make her, would never have noticed if she lived or died or left and she doesn’t owe it a thing, she never did.

Of course it was a lie, Jason had said—let’s stop being delusional about being a team of superheroes—but looking at Trini’s arm held high in the air, Kimberly can almost believe—

She raises her own hand. Trini turns to look at her, and Kimberly looks back, can’t help the stupid smile spreading across her face.

Billy’s the last, but it’s not out of reluctance or fear—just a considering tilt of his head, as though weighing the odds, and this is it, then, Kimberly thinks, heart thudding in her chest. This is really it. This is what they’ve become.

“Okay,” Jason’s saying, grin so brilliant she has to take a moment to wonder how on earth this town had ever let him be anything less, all this time. “Let’s go.”

 

Zack looks at Trini through the flickering light of the campfire and sees her, sees right through her for who she really is, and it’d be terrifying, but the glass rim of her beer bottle is solid against her teeth and the dim firelight is enough excuse for her to not look back. To not see the truth there. Instead she looks up into the darkness of the sky, at all the light that is not there, and lets her tongue run loose. In the numb haze of half-drunkenness it’s easy to slip, to tilt her head up and lose herself in that dizzy nothingness.

It’s the most she’s talked in years. Her voice aches from disuse, from knowing at some point it will have to break.

“Are we Power Rangers?” she says, and she drags her eyes back down from the stars to the rest of them, pinning them down. “Or are we friends.” It’s hardly even a question. The alcohol on her tongue is bitter even to herself.

But then Rita’s slamming her around her room and the plaster’s crumbling everywhere and when Trini’s head knocks into the wall her vision goes fuzzy for a moment, focuses somewhere beyond Rita’s shoulder, at the crack in the blue stained glass on her window letting in the light of the moon, the white curtains fluttering in the wind, the plants and shelves and the stupid painting her mother put up and Trini tried to cover with cutouts from magazines and drawings of her own, and all she can think is that her mom’s gonna lose her shit, it’s all gonna take so long to fix—

But it can be fixed, she thinks, on the floor of her room, after Rita’s gone. Her room— _hers._ She can taste blood in her mouth like relief, because it means she’s alive, and as long as she’s alive she can fix this. She thinks of her brothers. She thinks of the stories in their comic books. She thinks of her mother’s face of careful concentration when she hangs a painting on the wall perfectly straight, and she shakes the dust and crumbled drywall from her hair, goes to find the others.

 

“Okay,” Billy whoops, “now _that’s_ cool,” but even as he says it the armor is beginning to fade away, disappearing like it was never there at all. He stares back at the others, wide-eyed. “Y’all saw that, right? I’m not going crazy?”

“Oh my god, Billy,” Kimberly says, eyes shining, “you did it, you _morphed,_ it’s real,” but then the big voice from above is coming out to play, and it looks like he disagrees.

“How’d you do it, Billy,” Jason says, and for once Billy doesn’t have the answer. He clenches his eyes shut, holds out his hands, but nothing happens. Okay, Billy thinks, he’s just gotta go back, retrace his steps, recreate the conditions. Zack had gone and done something magnificently stupid, even for him, and then Jason’d slugged him straight in the face, which was even more surprising. Like when he’d slapped Colt Wallace in the middle of detention in front of everybody. Like when he’d done it for Billy. And now Jason’s looking at him the way he did after Billy got rid of that ankle monitor for him, but that was easy, that was just science. This is something else, something you can’t learn from a textbook or Wikipedia or your dad. What had happened next? Zack had fucked up and Jason had punched him and then they were going at each other like either of them deserved to be hit, deserved to be hurt, and Billy’d stepped in with only one thought: that they were more than this.

“Go home,” Zordon’s saying, and oh—if that was supposed to be Billy’s moment to shine, he’d missed it. They’re all leaving, now, avoiding his gaze. For a moment they’d all looked at him like he held all the secrets of the universe, and now he’s just back to being Billy.

As they file out past him he takes a second to stare back down at his palms. He knows what he’s done, what power his hands held, just now. He didn’t imagine it. It was real. And if it was real, then he can find it again. He’ll figure it out. It's only a matter of time, Billy knows, and he slings his backpack over his shoulder, scurries out to join the others.

 

Kimberly sits up in the rubble and spits rock dust out of her mouth. “You okay?” she says, but Trini doesn’t answer, just gets to her feet and turns on Zack.

“What’s your _problem_ ,” Trini’s saying, “can’t you ever take this seriously, this isn’t all fun and games and goddamn fistfights—”

“You’re right!” Zack says, brushing past an irate Jason. “It’s not just those, it’s also glowing gemstones that give magical powers and robot machines in spaceships and aliens who’ve been waiting millions of years, millions of years just for _us,_ because _we’re_ the heroes that’re gonna save the world!” His burst of laughter is loud, echoing off the walls of the cave, and Billy winces. Jason sees it, and his face hardens.

“Is this what all this is to you?” Jason says. “A joke?”

Zack grins, teeth gleaming white in the darkness. “The funniest one I’ve heard in years,” he says. “C’mon, don’t tell me you _believe_ it. Don’t tell me you really think you’re a superhero.”

Kimberly feels it like a physical blow. She wants to slap that grin off his face. “It’s the end of the _world,_ ” she says. _What else is there to believe in,_ she thinks.

Zack’s face goes blank, then, so in a way, it worked. “It was always the end of the world,” he says, and his voice is almost cold.

“You don’t get it, do you,” Jason’s saying, “you could’ve _killed_ us there, or yourself—”

And then it _does_ devolve into just another goddamn fistfight, and it makes Kimberly sick down to her stomach. This is it, she thinks, this is all they ever were, and it was stupid to believe they could have ever been something bigger—

Until for a single glorious moment, Billy proves her wrong.

 

“ _Silence!_ ” roars the voice in the wall, and then—just like that—silence is all there is, as though he’s spoken it into existence. Zack’s eyes fly open—when had he closed them?—to see the ceiling of the trailer. He’s flat on his back on the couch and instantly he knows that something is wrong. It’s too quiet, too still, and he knows what that means. He’s always known it.

“No,” Zack says, because it’s his first instinct, what he knows best, to resist, but the word slips out of his mouth noiselessly, and he’s flying off the couch, flinging open the door to his mother’s room, already knowing what he’s going to find—

But she isn’t there. The bed is empty, the sheets perfectly made. The window is open. A breeze ruffles through the curtains, pricks the hair on the back of Zack’s neck.

How did he get here?

He turns around to see that the front door is open, left slightly ajar. The doorknob beckons. Everything’s too quiet, the air too thin, like it’s not even real. As though pulled by a string, Zack moves to the door, pulls it open the rest of the way.

He’s in Angel Grove. The main road stands before him, the blocks of stores and telephone poles and street signs, but the whole place is empty, deserted. The trailer home’s gone, too, disappeared as soon as Zack set foot through the door, and he’s got nowhere to go but forward, towards the sudden storm of dust that’s rising behind the buildings, the faint green glow in the distance.

Then a hush of rotted breath over his face, a glint of a golden tooth in a mouth gaping open into a grin, and she’s right _there,_ in front of him, hand reaching up to claw at him, and Zack can’t breathe, can’t think, turns his head away to see the rest of the town turning into ash, filled with corpses that crumble at his touch, and oh, Zack realizes, it’s the end of the world, at last.

He wants to stand there, dig his heels into the ground and fucking take it, wants to fight back, but it’s like he’s been rendered immobile, powerless to do anything but gasp for breath. Still, a numb, detached part of him is taking it all in, the death all around him. So this is what it’s like, he tells himself. Now that he knows—as long as he knows—he can be prepared.

It’s her eyes that scare him, most of all. Focused straight into the heart of him, like she sees it all, like she knows exactly where to dig her fingernails in and rip it out. Where to hurt. The laughter playing at her lips, like she knows just how easy it would be.

When Zack comes out of the vision the world’s still standing, but he knows the truth. Gets the hell out of there and goes home. His mother’s pleased to see him, but he can’t quite look her in the eye, because he knows, now—all the stories she tells him are true. Monsters are real in this world.

 

All things considered Trini’s taking her new abilities a lot better than she should be. Maybe it’s her little brothers’ influence, forever chattering in her ears about superheroes and villains, or maybe it’s because with a life as fucked up as hers she should’ve known she’d end up becoming either one or the other—and the jury’s still out on which. But deep down she thinks it’s because it only confirms what she already knew: that she has enough power in her to level a car, a house, this entire fucking town from its roots.

But she’s not the only one.

There’s an odd thrill in her chest when they start climbing the rocks after her, that for once she isn’t in it alone. Still, it doesn’t stop her from running, if just because she knows they’ll lose interest, drop off from the chase—except they don’t. Zack follows her across a canyon with a triumphant whoop, leading the rest of them straight to her, and all she can think is, she should’ve known he was gonna be trouble.

“I’ll see you guys down there,” he says, and he’s gone, and Trini snorts. In his dreams maybe. She’s turning to leave them behind, but Kimberly goddamn Hart’s standing there on the edge of the cliff, a dangerous dare in her eye.

“Just talk to me,” says Kimberly, looking harmless as hell in her newly shorn hair, and Trini wants to laugh. Funny—everyone always says that, but she can’t remember the last time somebody’s actually wanted to hear what she has to say. She knows better than to break her silence, these days.

“Fine,” Kimberly’s saying, and then—“Can I get a drink of your water bottle?”

Trini gives her a flat stare, but Kimberly just shrugs. “I’m dying,” she says, as though it explains everything.

What a princess, Trini’s thinking when she steps forward, but it’s not until Kimberly’s hand clamps down around her wrist like a vise that she realizes maybe she’d been looking into the mouth of a dragon the whole time. Her brothers would never let her live this down if they knew.

Wind rises up to meet her when she opens her mouth to scream, Kimberly’s hand still clinging to hers like a lifeline, like she still won’t let her go even when there’s nowhere left for Trini to run, nothing left to do but fall—and the world catches her in a crash of water, everything wet with yellow light around her and her laughter comes out in bubbles, lungs bursting with the ache of it all because she knew it, she’s always known it. There was always more to this world.

 

The van’s going so fast down the road, Jason barely has enough breath to laugh—but he thinks he would, if he could, because he’s hurtling down a hill with the cuff around his ankle a blinking useless light in the darkness, and they’re gonna make it—they’re really gonna make it—

The crash obliterates his vision in a screaming flash of white, glass splintering, everything breaking, falling apart.

When he wakes up he feels better than he has in years. There’s not a single scratch on his body, the pain in his leg’s dulled to a distant roar, and the newly minted abs on his stomach are hard enough to cut glass. He studies himself in the mirror, runs his tongue over every one of his teeth. Remembers the four others with him in the car. That’s new, too.  

“Hmm,” he says aloud. Going to school seems redundant after he’s just woken up in his bed with super strength, but he knows it’s the only way he’s going to get any answers.

“Listen,” Billy says to Jason later, after school, when they’re waiting for Kimberly outside the girl’s restroom. “Yesterday, in the mine—”

“I know,” Jason says, “those coins, they’ve gotta be the reason for this somehow. We just gotta go back to find out what—”

“No,” Billy says, “you’re not listening,” and Jason stops. “We almost died, last night. We should have died, we were hit by a train, the odds of surviving that crash were zero to none, if the crash didn’t kill us the fall would have, you know it, you _felt_ it. We should have died. We should be dead.”

“Jeez, thanks Billy,” says Jason, and he’d say something more, take the lump in his throat and turn it on its side, flip it into something light, but there’s something hard in Billy’s eyes, something he hasn’t seen in him before. Something he has a feeling is gonna be important.

“We should be dead,” Billy says, “because we would never have made that crash, and because we would never have made it past that train, but you said we would, you said I got it, when I didn’t.” He looks angry, but it’s not directed at Jason, exactly. “When I knew I didn’t, but I still followed you, because I wanted to believe—”

“Billy,” Jason interrupts. “We _did_ make it. Look, I’m sorry I put that on you, but we’re here now, aren’t we? We survived, and what’s more—we’re stronger than we were before. We’re not dead—we’re the _opposite_ of dead, see,” and he lifts an arm, flexes with a shit-eating grin on his face. “It doesn’t matter.”

Billy just looks at him. Just stops him dead with his stare, like he sees through him, like he sees straight through him to his heart and he doesn’t see anything there. “It matters,” Billy says. “It always matters. It always matters to someone.”

Jason’s saved from having to reply when Kimberly comes out of the bathroom, door swinging shut behind her. “What’d I miss,” she says, and Billy just shrugs. Turns to walk with her down the hallway, leaving Jason nothing to do but follow.

 

“Yeah, I see you too, homeboy,” the girl says, from above, and Zack can’t help his flinch, because it hadn’t occurred to him that she would—because it’s been years, really, since anyone has seen him, Zack Taylor, nothing more than an absent space on an attendance sheet to be skipped over. But the moment gets thankfully lost in the confusion of the rockslide, and then in the aftermath, the discovery of glowing glass buried beneath the rock.

“Don’t break it,” Billy shouts, but Zack goes ahead and slams the hammer down because it’s what he’s good at, it’s what he does, and at any rate he’s never known how to do anything else. He barely listens to the protests of the others—like they’re not all dying to know what it is—and digs out the coins, holds them up to the light.

“Huh,” he says. Pretty stones—might be worth something, if he goes to the pawnshop and bluffs well enough. He slants his gaze at the others—just high schoolers, like him. Maybe he can get them to give theirs up, if he pretends they’re just rocks—but then the alarm goes off, and he makes himself scarce, letting the shadows swallow him up.

But the others—they’re _crazy,_ maybe just as much as him, swerving down the road in a goddamn caravan, and there’s police lights flashing everywhere and Zack’s got nothing left to lose, so he jumps. For a moment, suspended in the air as though he can fly, he thinks of his mother, of the disappointment in her eyes if she could see him now. If he doesn’t make this jump it’ll be the last face he sees, so he holds onto it as tight as he can, eyes wide open and wind whistling past his ears hard enough to hurt. His mother with a smile on her face, telling him another old story about heroes and villains, angels and monsters, _it’s true, you know, they’re real, Zack, one day you’ll believe me, one day you’ll see_ —but he lands with a crash that rattles every bone in his body because of course it wasn’t going to be that easy, because maybe angels are real after all, looking out for him, and because it’s hard to miss a target that big, anyway—Jesus, who takes a _family van_ to a restricted mine?

“Next time,” he gasps out when they’ve pulled him safely into the backseat, “bring a truck,” and they look at him like he’s lost his mind, but they’re the ones driving towards a speeding train, so really, it takes one to know one.

 

That day of detention Kimberly looks into the bathroom mirror and considers its sharp edge. Her reflection stands ghostly still next to the photograph speared to the wall. In the end she uses a different blade, cuts a different part of her, but the sentiment might as well be the same. And it’s not enough, even if it drives her parents crazy and draws stares from everyone in the whole school, so she goes out to the mountain that night, hikes the trails until she reaches the cliffs. Stares down at the town below, the rows and rows of tiny houses and buildings and people. From this height she can almost pretend she’s above it all, when deep down she knows she’s nothing but Angel Grove born and bred. She belongs on the ground with the rest of them, so when the fall offers itself up to her, she takes it.

When she emerges back up into the world there’s some guy calling her name, like he could possibly know who she is. Jason Scott. The golden boy, rusting under exposure. And something else, too—a hand reaching out to a stranger in detention, a misplaced gesture in the rest of all this rot. It doesn’t add up, but then again, it’s not like Kimberly knows who he is, either.

“You would never do it,” Kimberly says—you don’t know what it’s like to lose everything, even yourself. But there’s something in his eyes that’s a little startlingly blank, as though reflecting herself back at her, and she rises up to the challenge.

“Try me,” she says, because she’ll do it, she will. Throw her life away on a dare. There’s nothing left of it anyways. The cliff is behind her, but she can feel herself so close to another edge, one she won’t come back from. Come on, Kimberly thinks. Dare me. Give me a push. I know you’re dying for it too.

Then Billy Cranston goes and blows up the mine, and they’re saved from having to leave their lives behind like a dead thing on the side of the road.

 

“I’m on the spectrum,” Billy explains, and he’s looking Jason straight in the eye when he says it so he can see his reaction, figure it out. There’s surprise, but Billy’d expected nothing less, and then it sort of flattens out back into his even stare, not soft, exactly, but sharper with the weight of understanding, and Billy’s still trying to work out what it means when Jason huffs out a breath, drops his end of the toolbox.

“You don’t need to tell me all of this,” Jason says, “we’re cool.”

Huh, Billy thinks, and then Jason’s leaving, actually calling his name and pointedly waving a hand to let him know, and Billy shrugs, lets him go. He’s still stuck on the word _cool_ —people have called him a lot of things, smart or sweet on the kinder end of things, a lot more creative words he’ll never repeat on the other end, but it’s the first time anyone’s said _cool._ It doesn’t quite match with who he is, see— _cool_ is for the comic books Billy’s always got his nose stuck in, for the football quarterback with a future brighter than his white-toothed grin in the yearbook photos, but today was the first time Billy’d seen any of that light for himself, when he had reached out his hand to shake and Jason Scott had taken it. Had helped him. So Billy’d helped him back. Seemed like the right thing to do.

If you find something cool, you can keep half, he’d told Jason earlier, and he’d meant it. It was his father’s golden rule: everything they discovered belonged to the both of them. Then his father had gone down the mine and never come back up, and was the hole he’d left behind meant to be shared, too? Because it isn’t that Billy wants to die—ever—but if he’s got to, someday, he knows he wants it to be here. The mine he knows like the back of his hand, because his dad had taught it to him. Had taught everything to him, except how to go it alone. But Billy’s been managing it alright, he thinks, and anyway—he’s not alone tonight, not really, not with Jason Scott here. Sure, Jason left, but he’ll come around, Billy knows, when he sees Billy make the _coolest_ damn explosion, when he lights up bright enough for his father to see.

“I hope you’re watching, Dad,” Billy says. He has a good feeling about today, he thinks, and gets to work.

 

The worst thing about it all is the house, every time. Every time they move into a new house and they pretend it’s going to last into a home. This one’s got a year on it and counting, but Trini knows it’s only a matter of time, so she can’t for the life of her understand why her mother still bothers with the decor, arranging plants and hanging up ugly paintings of nothing at all, remodeling entire rooms like they’re still gonna be living in them this time next year. Give it a rest, Trini would tell her, if she still spoke to her at all. Who’re you putting on a show for?

For now, though, she’s stuck in limbo, a purgatory of high school hallways and a small town that perpetually stinks of fish. There’s a beach, but she’s always liked the mountains better—there’s always more to see, from the top. Miles of stone and water and life that doesn’t try to talk to her, pick her apart. And a boy, too, who seems to spend all his time sitting on top of abandoned train cars, one she sometimes catches peering at her curiously through binoculars, but she ignores him. It’ll take more than some harmless guy to ruin this place for her.

Whenever her mother starts her daily interrogation, when her father frowns at her with that disappointed look on his face, when her little brothers won’t shut up about Batman versus Superman and she can’t take it anymore, Trini always remembers the mountains, thinks of a world bigger than this. Snaps, “superheroes aren’t real, stupid,” and stomps out of the house, and the slam of the screen door behind her has to be enough.

She stays out there for hours, until the sun’s set and the fireflies are out, until she can’t see the shape of the town anymore from the top of the mountains, until she’s empty save for the ache of craving sunk deep into her bones, thinking—there’s got to be more. This can’t be it. There’s got to be more to this world.

 

Jason wakes up from a dreamless sleep. Washes his face, gets dressed, goes downstairs for breakfast. Brushes his teeth. Goes to school. There’s a girl he passes by in the hallway with the blankest look he’s ever seen, and it’s almost like looking into a mirror, so he looks away, at the trophy case on the wall instead. His last name and his jersey number, synonymous at this point. He stares at it until he has to crane his neck to keep it in his line of vision, until it’s imprinted onto his eyelids, until it’s all he is.

In class a couple of his teammates are snickering to each other in the back row, where the teacher can’t hear them, or at least where she can pretend to not hear them, because they’re star athletes on the football team and their school can’t afford to give them detention and make them miss out on practice. They’re talking about a prank, something to mess with the principal. “A chicken,” one of them says, “just imagine—we get a chicken and place it in his office, right on his desk like some kinda birthday present—”

“What about a pig,” the other says, “that’s way funnier, don’t you think—”

Jason leans forward in his chair slightly, deliberately. Taps the point of his pencil to his chin. “A cow,” he says, and they turn to him in surprise. Like they didn’t think he was capable of this. “We get a cow, and we don’t put it in the principal’s office—we put it in the locker room.”

“The locker room?” one of them says, looking skeptical. “Won’t Coach get mad? And how the fuck’re we supposed to get a _cow_ into the school?”

“C’mon,” says Jason. He doesn’t even try to lower his voice. The teacher’s gaze slides onto him, then right off again, like he’s invisible. Like he’s not even there. “It’ll be good.”

“Yeah, you’re right—it’ll be hilarious, can you imagine the look on his face,” and they’re laughing now, and it’s really that easy. “Hey—hey Jason, you know this is a really bad idea, right?”

"The worst,” says Jason, and grins.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 山: mountain  
> 火: fire  
> 人: person/people  
> 飞: fly
> 
> i never would have expected my first completed fic of 2017 to be for power rangers, a franchise i admittedly know nothing about, but then again i never would have expected seeing two chinese characters straight-up speak to each other in mandarin—none of that accented english shit, but mandarin with subtitles—on the big screen. nor would i have ever expected to see a non-straight latina superhero on the big screen. nor would i have ever expected that the chinese character was the one to instantly recognize and understand that she wasn't straight, which means a whole new MOUNTAIN of things that i would never, ever have expected to receive from my local movie theatre. like, it's still blowing my mind right now, in case you can't tell. 
> 
> but also i came out of the theatre two months ago and thought damn, those were some kids with issues, but i let it go. or at least i thought i did. 9k words later we all know that's not the case, but to quote my own tweet immediately after watching the movie: "teenagers w a group dynamic and no sense of future. yeah thats my name written all over it." *shrug emoji* this is my take on their story. thank you for reading.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [we carry each other (we’re just different colors)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15359706) by [hearden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearden/pseuds/hearden)




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